5 Ways to Build Social Skills

There is a significant correlation between your social skills and your success in any area of life. With good social skills, it’s easier to make friends, build strong relationships and get ahead in your career.

If you lack social skills, it’s important to learn how to build social skills. In this article, I’m going to reveal to you the 5 most effective ways I know for building social skills, based on my experience as a social confidence coach.

1. Practice

Developing any ability is largely a matter of practice. In order to develop your social skills, you need to spend a lot of time interacting with others.

By meeting new people, conversing with them and getting to know them, you develop your intuition about people and you gradually become better at attuning to them and building a connection with them.

You may be tempted to avoid social interactions because you think you lack social skills, but unfortunately, this only keeps you lacking social skills. The key to improving them is to interact with others no matter how capable you are right now.

2. Take Risks

It’s not enough to just interact with others. It’s central to also take risks when doing so. This means expressing your true thoughts and feelings, and behaving in an authentic manner.

This is important because if you just stick to behaving during a social interaction in ways that are very strict and safe, you don’t really experiment and explore the possibilities. And this makes it harder for your social skills to expand.

You really want to express your entire personality and notice how others react, in order to wise up socially. If you have trouble in this area, I advise you to learn how to be yourself and little by little to become more expressive.

3. Ask for Feedback

It’s hard to adjust your interpersonal skills when you don’t understand exactly how people see you and what effect certain sides of your personality have on them. This is where feedback comes in.

Ask people you know and you trust to give you feedback. To give you their perspective on how you come across socially, on your strengths and your weaknesses. They can do this casually while chatting, or fill in some sort of feedback form you can devise.

Collect a number of feedbacks and look at the information you acquired. It will help you understand yourself, others and social interactions better. And this is how to build social skills.

4. Interact with Socially Skilled People

One of the best ways to gain social skills is through modeling others. You interact with people who have good social skills, you study their mannerisms and you learn from them.

So, seek to meet individuals who are people savvy and hang out with them a lot. You’ll notice that just by doing this, your social skills will go up.

And if on top of this, you’ll also study them intentionally and try on for size pieces of their conduct, these skills will go up even faster. Socially skilled individuals are an infinite source of wisdom.

5. Work on Specific Goals

There is quite a wide array of social skills and trying to develop them all at once doesn’t yield results. You’re spreading yourself too thin.

A much better approach is to pick one or two specific skills at a time and work on improving them. Only when you’ve made enough progress with them, you can advance to other interpersonal skills.

This means you don’t want to learn merely how to build social skills, but also ways to build the specific social skills that interest you the most. Setting specific goals and working on them is the best way to get results.

As your social skills build, you’ll find yourself feeling more confident in social settings and connecting easier with others. These skills will open up a wide range of opportunities in your life. All you have to do is take advantage of them.

Eduard Ezeanu is a social confidence coach. He teaches people how to overcome shyness, build social skills and live life to the fullest. He also writes on his blog, People Skills Decoded.